I was astonished to hear from a lecturer at art school that he found my video confronting. He is so used to semi-clad female forms dancing in time to techno music that he found the images in
my video discomforting, singing mouths which panned back to show that the mouths belonged to small children. He thought it might be a very clever comment on the issue of sexualisation of children.
Today I read in
Sydney Morning Herald that the Bill Henson photos have lead to a push to disallow artist's privilege for imagery of children which is pornographic. Writer David Marr says the problem with that is the "widespread notion that has been growing over the past decade that just about any image of a child naked or scantily or precociously dressed is pornographic." I suppose that if, like my lecturer, you associate techno music with scantily clad females, you could argue that my film is questionable.
The issue is not an easy one. There is a very interesting article on
the art life that discusses Henson's early photos and the art world's reaction to them. In my view these early photos are not the work of a disinterested observer and that makes me queasy about the rest of his work.
Jewellery class students collecting rocks on an argillite outcrop at Colac Bay, east of Invercargill. Argillite is a greenish stone, originally sedimentary rock.
